Chris Apolzon

I just finished my first run-through with Google’s new Chrome OS and I figured I’d jot down my thoughts.

My initial reaction is that it is very startling to be forced into a full screen web browsing experience and no ability to see a non-browser window.  That being said, once you overcome this irking feeling the browser is fast and definitely achieves the goal of a full cloud computing experience.  There doesn’t seem to be any way to directly browse the file system, but if you try to upload a file to google docs you can see the full extent of the file system.

You are able to create new windows, but the only way to switch is to alt+tab with no visual feedback; probably not a good idea to have a lot of windows open.  I gave the system 512 megs of ram and it definitely slowed with 3 or 4 browsing windows open (in addition to gmail and gcal) and I managed to hang the OS (it recovered on its own) by attempting to load google wave.

All options dialogs reveal the true GTK windowing system used under the hood.  These dialogs are full-screen and decidedly ugly…but who cares!  We’re running a minute OS where practically all data exists somewhere away from your local device.  You probably won’t use it to develop on the move (unless Mozilla’s Bespin project shows a lot of improvement by the Chrome release), but who knows what kinds of little apps google will package with it on release.

Its obviously at an alpha level at this point, but I see potential both as a very thin mobile computing device and ideal for a public or family used computer to allow instantaneous user switching and long-term session persistence.

Edit: Once the browser OS recovered, it was able to successfully load wave responsively and just as fast as on any other modern browser.

Also: If you run the vmware image and aren’t able to get network connectivity, log in using chronos/password as a local login and then you’ll be able to login via the browser.

Tags: google